Killing Hour - Lisa Gardner [138]
She stared too long. Forgot what she was doing. And her exhausted, dehydrated body finally gave out. Her hand reached up. Her fingers failed to connect.
And then she went backwards.
For a moment, she felt herself suspended in midair. She could see her arms and legs churning, like one of those silly cartoon creatures. Then reality reasserted itself. Gravity took over.
Tina plummeted down into the muck.
No scream this time. The mud swallowed her whole and after all these days, she did not protest.
Kimberly was still talking forty-five minutes later. She talked of water and food and warm sun. She talked of the weather and the baseball season and the birds in the sky. She talked of old friends and new friends and won’t it be nice to meet in person?
She talked of holding on. She talked of never giving up. She talked of miracles and how they could happen if you willed them hard enough.
Then Mac came out of the woods. She took one look at his face and stopped talking.
Seventeen minutes later, they brought the body up.
CHAPTER 40
Lee County, Virginia
7:53 P.M.
Temperature: 98 degrees
THE SUN STARTED TO DESCEND, surfing bright orange waves of heat. Shadows grew longer, while it remained stifling hot. And in the abandoned sawmill, vehicles started to pile up.
First came more members of the cavers’ search-and-rescue team. They finished hauling out the lifeless body of a young girl with short-cropped brown hair. Her yellow-flowered slip dress had been reduced to tatters by the acidic water. The fingernails on both of her hands were broken and ragged, as if at some point she’d clawed frantically at the hard dolomite walls.
The rest of her was blue and bloated; Josh Shudt and his men had found her body floating in the long tunnel that connected the cavern’s sinkhole entrance to the main chamber. They’d pushed through to the cathedral room after pulling out her body. There, on a ledge, they’d found an empty gallon jug of water and a purse.
According to her driver’s license, the victim’s name was Karen Clarence, and just one week ago she had turned twenty-one.
It didn’t take much to fill in the rest. The UNSUB had delivered the victim, most likely drugged and unconscious, to the main chamber. The stovepipe skylight forty feet above would’ve offered precious little light when the girl awoke. Enough to realize she had a shallow pond of relatively safe rainwater to her left and a stream of highly polluted, toxic water to her right. Maybe she stayed on the ledge for a while. Maybe she tried the small pond and promptly got bitten by its already stressed inhabitants—the white, eyeless crayfish, or the tiny, rice-sized isopods. Maybe she even encountered a ring-necked snake.
Either way, the girl had probably ended up wet. And once you got wet in an environment that’s constantly fifty-five degrees, hypothermia’s only a matter of time.
Shudt told them all a story of a caver who’d lasted two weeks lost in five miles of winding underground caverns. Of course, he’d been wearing proper gear and had a pack full of protein bars. He’d also been lost in a healthy cavern, where the water was not only safe to drink, but according to local lore, brought the drinker good luck.
Karen Clarence hadn’t been so lucky. She’d managed not to brain her skull on a thick stalactite. She’d managed not to bruise a knee or sprain a wrist crawling in the dark amid the stalagmites. But at some point, she’d headed straight into the polluted stream. Water that acidic must have burned her skin, just as it promptly ate holes in her dress. Was she beyond caring at that point? Had the cold set in so deep, the burning liquid felt good against her flesh? Or had she simply been that determined? She would die sitting on the ledge. The shallow pond led nowhere. That left only the stream to guide her back to civilization.
Either way, she immersed herself in the stream, her clothes eroding, her face streaming with tears. She had followed the stream to the narrow